1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus, method, and system for searching for a reputation of a content, such as a broadcast program content or a content stored in a package medium, for example.
2. Description of the Related Art
With a recent increase in capacity of hard disk drives, recording and reproducing apparatuses have emerged that are capable of recording such a large number of television broadcast program contents as to exceed one day in length, for example. Many of such recording and reproducing apparatuses are equipped with a feature of automatically selecting television broadcast program contents based on taste information or a keyword registered by a user, and recording the selected television broadcast program contents. Thus, the user is often obliged to consider which of the large number of recorded television broadcast program contents to reproduce.
The user of the above type of recording and reproducing apparatuses is able to select an arbitrary recorded television broadcast program content from the large number of recorded television broadcast program contents, and reproduce and watch the selected recorded television broadcast program content. It is desirable, however, that the user be able to know a reputation of each of the recorded television broadcast program contents, when selecting the recorded television broadcast program content to be reproduced. The reputation of each of the recorded television broadcast program contents will be useful as a basis for selecting a desired content from the large number of television broadcast program contents.
On the Internet, there are a large number of websites on which users have written their impressions or opinions concerning various topics. There have already been proposed systems for collecting such impressions and opinions concerning the various topics, and analyzing these impressions and opinions using a morphological analysis technique or a syntactic analysis technique to identify reputations concerning the topics (see Japanese Patent Laid-open No. 2003-248681, 2003-157255, 2003-157254, and 2003-157253, for example).